Parenting is by no means a perfect science, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt when you make a huge mistake. Take it from one dad who wanted to lend a helping hand when his wife went to nurse their son and instead ended up seriously burning his son's mouth because of a nipple shield accident.
The dad explained that he was trying to be helpful by grabbing his wife's nipple shield, but instead he made a huge parenting mistake.
As he explained in a post on Reddit, the dad had been planting pepper seeds before he went inside to help his wife get ready to breastfeed their newborn son. "I heard the baby’s timely cry, so like clockwork, I grabbed the nipple shield, washed it, and placed it on my wife’s nipple for her so she could feed the baby without having to get up," he wrote. Well in the words of Julia Roberts from Pretty Woman: "Big mistake. HUGE."
"Little did I know, but some of the pepper oil that got on my hands (I didn’t know dried peppers could still have oil in them) got on the nipple shield," he wrote, and once his son put that nipple to his mouth BOOM. "Our baby started to WAIL and nothing could make him stop."
The dad had accidentally given his newborn a taste of the World's Spiciest Pepper -- and didn't realize it until later.
"Our baby started to WAIL and nothing could make him stop. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong until my mouth began to burn," he wrote. "I guess I had also gotten my fingers near my mouth."
Once the dad realized that he had accidentally given his son an extra spicy feeding, he tasted his finger and recognized that his son tasted a Carolina Reaper — which the Guinness World Records named "The Hottest Chilli Pepper" in August 2017.
"My tender little boy cried bloody murder for at least two and a half hours straight and we did everything we could think of/find on the Internet to stop the burning," he added. "Now I feel like I should never touch my child again — this whole fatherhood thing is not off to a great start."
Other parents had to laugh. Welcome to parenthood: You're going to keep making mistakes from here.
"My ten-year-old loves to hear stories about what a ‘terrible mother’ I was when he was a baby, if your family is anything like mine this will become a classic," one person shared in the comments. "Hang in there, you’re doing fine."
"That’ll be an almost-funny story before you know it," another person told him. "Two kids into this, I [expletive] up plenty, but they’re too young to remember anyway! [Expletive] happens, dad."
"Even though that must have been terrible to feel so helpless it was at least in the kindness of being a good dad! You are definitely not the worst dad ever. Accidents do not mean that you are a bad parent," someone else wrote.
And many people were thankful that it was only the baby's mouth that got hit with the heat.
"Thank goodness you didn't change your child. That would have stepped up the severity of this mistake 10-fold," one person commented.
And someone else shared their own pepper problem. "One time I rubbed ghost pepper on my eye and turned out fine it just hurt like hell for a while… after the burning your baby should be alright," the redditor commented.
Many people asked the dad why he didn't wash his hands, but he answered that that he had washed his hand before touching the nipple shield. "I did wash them! That didn’t deter the oil," he wrote.
He also shared that his wife luckily wasn't hit with the super spicy oil and added that his son was crying so hard "he wouldn’t latch to drink milk … so I eventually got a bottle of pumped milk and put some of it around and in his mouth," he wrote, though he did eventually stop crying. "My baby is done with the spices for now," he joked.
In the end, the dad wrote that he shared his story because his fail taught him something about being a "good" parent. "That’s the thing they tell you about being a dad, but you don’t really understand it until you experience it — there are things (like pain) that you wish you could take over for your kid, but you just can’t," he wrote. "And you just feel so helpless because you’ve done everything you can do."
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